Life after SCIO: alumna awarded fellowship

We are extremely pleased by the news that Rebecca Richards (year long, 2016) has been granted the John Jay Fellowship.

Raised in East Winthrop, Maine, Rebecca completed an undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Baylor University, Texas. Following her time at university, Rebecca applied for the John Fellowship based in Philadelphia, for which she has been accepted. Regarding the fellowship, she writes:

The stated goal of John Jay is to create principled, public leaders. For four months, eight fellows live together in a house outside Philadelphia and study the interface of philosophy, politics and faith from Constantine to the present.

The fellowship shares several features with the SCIO programme: ‘Similar to SCIO’, she writes, ‘we read 150 pages a day on average, write weekly papers and spend 3 hours in seminar four days a week.’

Remembering her time at SCIO, Rebecca writes:

As much as I care about Baylor, my time at Oxford was the highlight of my time at university. It sharpened my approach to general academics but especially to political philosophy. SCIO also cultivated an incredible community where fellow students from diverse academic disciplines and colleges studied, ate, and debated together. During and after the program, I felt cared for by everyone in leadership at SCIO. After my experience at Oxford, I knew I had to keep studying political philosophy and to find or build that kind of community. The John Jay Fellowship has elements of both.

Like many SCIO students, Rebecca’s plans for the future are suitably ambitious:

After the fellowship ends, I am hoping to move to DC this spring to work in public policy and social justice. Eventually, I would like to go to graduate school to study political philosophy and public policy. I still think about the tutorials I had at Oxford and draw on the knowledge I gained there in seminar. While I did not leave Oxford with a ten-year plan for my life, I feel prepared for whatever the future holds.